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Cowboy Nocturne
(1975) is an early work, written when Savage was 23. Its
surface alludes to a Chopin nocturne with widely spaced,
broken-bass harmonizations of the melody in parallel
sixths and abrupt dynamic shifts before the return of the
main theme. However, Savage's compositional voice-the
voice of the gay Cowboy-overwhelms the Chopinesque
ambience, evoking the American popular song of the 30s
and 40s. Utilizing eight-bar phrases harmonized by ninth
and seventh chords, a middle section with a contrasting
"jump bass" completing a "bridge,"
Savage incorporates the popular song's classic form as it
was adored by the gay male culture of the time. Most
striking is the final cadence ending on a ninth over a
pedal tone-a gesture unknown in Chopin's Paris but common
in every cocktail bar Savage's New York.
Frost Free (1987) has a savagely cryptic
title. Could the composer be thinking of a refrigerator?
What's the inside joke? The obscurity of the title
contrasts sharply with the clarity of the work's
emotional impact juxtaposing extremes of sadness and joy.
The opening phrase for solo clarinet states the plaintive
theme which is then joined by the piano's syncopated
ostinato of C octaves in the right hand and low triads in
the left. The ostinato's funky rhythm ultimately
underlies an alter ego of the sad opening melody, now
dancelike, swinging and twirling in the piano, swooping
into octatonic, ornamental cadenzas cross-dressed between
Benny Goodman and Francis Poulenc. Ultimately, the
plaintive melody returns in the coda, immediately
followed by its happy cousin, this time swinging with the
piano into a joyous ending in C.
Sudden Sunsets (1989-93) is Savage's
only work receiving compositional attention over a period
of years. It was written for Gary Fisher, with whom
Savage had his longest live-in, love relationship. The
score is strewn not only with customary musical notation
but with words to the players describing the emotional
intent of the work: "explosively,"
"ethereal," "expressionless, white,"
"funky," and most common, "angry."
Instrumental gestures are to be played with "sudden
anger," with "smoldering anger." It is not
surprising that the compositional life of this work
stretches in time from Savage's first awareness of being
HIV positive to his death from AIDS.
The piece is in two sections set apart by a slow duet for
violin and cello. The first part consists of seemingly
faraway images of "funky" dance music and
"ethereal" solo piano in a dream-like registral
spacing. The cello's major-seventh motive provides an
"angry" contrast, its double-stops repeated
over and over again in rage. These images alternate
throughout. The second part consists of a long minimalist
section of repeating patterns, pulses, and pedal tones,
and a slow conclusion of long, sustained tones. Savage
marks the beginning of the final section only with the
words, "deep peace." The anger is over. There
is a "letting go."
AIDS Ward Scherzo (1992) was written
during a stay at Lenox Hill Hospital in 1992, the year
before Savage's death. The title of the work reveals a
deep irony-"Scherzo" means "joke."
The work is written in an expanded scherzo form with two
"trios." The Scherzo proper begins with jazzy
fourth chords that are heavily, even brutally, voiced.
This passage gives way to the trio marked
"Nostalgic" in the score. This languid,
romantic music resumes the mood of Cowboy Nocturne of
seventeen years before. Savage's mixture of Chopinesque
ambience and popular song is back in all its youthful
glory. Both the scherzo and trio return, but each is
abruptly cut off-incomplete. The final consists only of a
single triad played over and over, louder and louder in
different octaves. On the score the final triad is
followed by one Japanese character, a powerful symbol of
Savage's Zen Buddhist practice.
Florida Poems (1984) on texts of Wallace
Stevens is one of three surviving works for voice.
Written in Taos, New Mexico, the work was conceived after
a solo hiking trip to the Florida Everglades and a very
social visit to Key West. Song 1, "Exquisite
Nomad," is a melodious recitative in which the
singer sings over only a few held chords in the piano.
The intervallic contents of the singer's lines have
circular, sensual, erotic contours-with motives always
imitating the setting of the word, "Florida".
In contrast, Song 2, "Indian River," evokes the
word "jingle" by a light sixteenth-note
ostinato in the piano, broken, however, by the stark
setting of "Yet there is no spring in Florida",
a return to the opening melody of the whole cycle. Song
3, "Two Figures in Dense Violet Light," returns
to the recitative style of Song 1, its middle stanzas a
variation of the cycle's opening. "Of Mere
Being," Song 4, is set in the contrasting, lilting
triple meter of an early English folksong. Song 5,
"O Florida, Venereal Soil," begins and ends
with the voice accompanied by the "jump bass"
of popular song. At the work's midpoint, however, the
"Fabliau of Florida," returns to the pure
recitative format of Song 1. Here, however, the high
ethereal harmonies accompanying the voice grow into lush,
deep rolling chords-the primal "droning of the
surf" at the cycle's end.
An Eye-Sky Symphony (1988) is Savage's
most ambitious work, written when the composer first
learned he was HIV-positive. Its programmatic titles
reflect emotional states leading Savage to the acceptance
of his own mortality. The first movement called
"Eye-Sky" has the subtitles
"Despair," "Hope," "Doubt,"
and "Determination." Musically,
"Despair" and "Hope" are variations
of the same material, reflecting the Buddhist assessments
that both mind-states avoid the present reality to focus
on an unknowable future. The slowly moving, atonal lines
of "Despair"-stark in their octave
settings-transform themselves into "Hope"-a
lively syncopated oboe and clarinet counterpoint
accompanied by rhythmically pulsating strings. Then comes
denial-the next section, "Doubt," which
features a dancing, Latin melody suggesting emotional
escape by remembrance of earlier youthful times, free
from care. Finally the pulsating rhythms and strong
orchestral chords of "Determination" stop any
fantasies and prefigure the powerful second movement,
"During the Fire." Here loud chords drown out
melodies with dancing Latin Rhythms or Chopinesque
sequences. The action winds down to a single note in the
tympani, first struck fortissimo but quickly brought down
to a virtually inaudible whisper, signaling
transformation and rebirth. Then "Endless
Spring" begins as a third movement whose lyrical
tonal melodies connote stability and emotional maturity.
The end, however, is a trumpet solo theme from the
"Fires" of the second movement, penetrating
sustained chords in the strings. The scoring of this
passage alludes to Charles Ives' "The Unanswered
Question," a favorite of Savage's. Here, as in Ives'
work, the question of the solo trumpet remains
unanswered, forever unknowable.
-Severine Neff
ROBERT SAVAGE was a composer who spoke
in diverse languages-the dance rhythms of the Caribbean
zydeco, Chopinesque keyboard flourishes, the lilt of
1930s and '40s American popular song, Stravinsky's
ostinati, the pulsing patterns of Minimalism-fusing them
into a post-modern voice all his own. Savage's broad
compositional vision reflects his persona as a
seeker-outwardly traveling to the Middle East, Latin
America, and Europe; inwardly reaching toward the essence
of Buddhist Enlightenment and finding ultimately creative
expression in the face of AIDS.
Born of American parents in Saudi Arabia, Savage came to
the United States as a teenager. He received a BA in
music from Columbia University in 1975 where he studied
with Jack Beeson. In subsequent years he studied
privately with Ben Weber, Ned Rorem, David Diamond, John
Corigliano, and David Del Tredici. Intensely engaged by
the natural world from childhood, Savage took lengthy
solo hiking trips in the 1970s and '80s in Central and
South America, the Pacific Northwest, Florida, and the
Southwestern mountains and deserts. These explorations
not only provided compositional inspiration, but they
also introduced Savage to indigenous musical forms. The
zydeco, a popular dance form he encountered in a year's
stay in New Orleans, became an important rhythmic force
in his works.
A student of Zen Buddhism, Savage founded a Buddhist
meditation group for persons with AIDS at the Gay Men's
Health Crisis in New York City. During a stay at Zen
Mountain Monastery, Mount Tremper, New York, he also
wrote several essays published in the Monastery's
journal, the Mountain Record, which relate his Zen
practice to his experiences of nature.
A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Wurlitzer
Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts,
the MacDowell and Dorland Mountain Colonies, and Zen
Mountain Monastery, Savage frequently played his music at
gatherings of friends and associates but rarely performed
his works in public. At age forty-two, Robert Savage died
in New York City of complications from AIDS.
MUSICIANS' ACCORD, A New Music Project,
founded in 1980 and directed by composer Laura Kaminsky,
is dedicated to the dissemination of contemporary music
through the presentation of concerts, live broadcasts,
master classes, workshops, recordings and the
commissioning of new works. Presenting innovative
concerts of contemporary music from a broad aesthetic
spectrum as well as classic and unknown 20th century
works has given Musicians' Accord a unique profile in the
new music community.
In residence at the City College of New York since 1984,
Musicians' Accord has also served as regular guest artist
at Fairleigh Dickinson University, N.J., as well as at
The Juilliard School, New York University, Columbia
University, Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, SUNY
at Stony Brook, The New School, and others. The ensemble
has commissioned and/or premiered close to 100 works to
date.
Highlights of Musicians' Accord's activities outside the
U.S. include performances and master classes in Macedonia
and the Slovak Republic, and a three-year-long project in
cooperation with the Spanish-American Joint Committee for
Cultural and Educational Cooperation which brought new
Spanish music to the States, and new American music to
Spain, with Musicians' Accord performing on both sides of
the Atlantic. Since its inception, Musicians' Accord has
been broadcast annually on radio stations such as WNYC,
WQXR, WBAI, and the Voice of America, as well as others
across the nation Musicians' Accord records for the Mode,
CRI and North/South labels.
THE POLISH RADIO NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
was founded in 1935 in Warsaw by conductor-composer
Grzegorz Fitelberg. The orchestra was re-founded in 1945
in Katowice. The list of conductors and soloists who have
worked with the orchestra includes Artur Rubinstein,
Isaac Stern, Witold Lutoslawski, Krzysztof Pendercki,
Leonard Bernstein, and Maurizio Pollini. The Polish Radio
National Symphony has made more than 200 recordings for
the EMI, Decca, Newport Classics, CRI, and Naxos labels.
Under music director Antoni Wit, the orchestra maintains
a high international profile through frequent appearances
at major festivals and through touring in Europe and the
Far East.
JOEL ERIC SUBEN had led first
performances and commercial recordings of nearly 200
works by American and European composers, among them
Pulitzer Prize winners Roger Sessions and Lesli Bassett.
a frequent guest conductor of major Central European
Orchestras, Suben recorded, in the 1995 and 1996 seasons
alone, over eleven hours of symphonic music with four
different European orchestras for six different record
labels. Suben's activities as a composer encompass some
60 published works. Since 1993 he has served as Music
Advisor of the Wellesley Philharmonic in Massachusetts.
SEVERINE NEFF is Professor of Music Theory at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her latest
book, co-authored with Patricia Carpenter and published
by Columbia University Press, is an edition and
translation of Arnold Schoenberg's The Musical Idea and
the Logic Technique and Art of Its Presentation.
Produced by Karl Hereim and Laura Kaminsky.
Recorded and edited by David Avidor, Home Productions.
An Eye-Sky Symphony recorded December 16 & 17, 1996
in the Concert Halss of the Polish Radio at Katowice,
Poland. Produced and Edited by Beata Jankowska-Burzynska.
Sudden Sunsets, AIDS Ward Scherzo, and Frost Free
recorded October 4-5, 1996 at Lenfell Hall, The Mansion,
Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey.
Cowboy Nocturne and Florida Poems recorded December
16-17, 1996 at the Recital Hall, SUNY Purchase, New York.
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